Not to get too crazy indepth, but Yahoo has made some poor business decisions. They have made some horrendous mistakes when it comes to brand recognition IMO. IIRC, just recently they have made strides in correcting this such as putting yahoo next to flickr etc... Google just had a better search engine and actually powered yahoo for a while which helped both companies, but obviously google more so. Yahoo does alright now, but just with a different crowd. Their gossip sections/celebrity bullshit is actually really popular, but that is not in most/if any of our interest/were not the target demographic.

_________________SCO=SCUM=M$=SCO it keeps repeating i'm a randite DYTDMFBSB?
There must have been some mistake
I'm not the one who should be saved
My divinity has been denied
Mary and me were both fucked by God

The term "google" was coined in the year 1212 A.D. by the Roman Catholic Church in the event of the lost "Children's Crusade." It came into use during the search (synonymous with google) for the lost in what is modern-day Tunisia.

_________________"He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth." -Goethe

What personally turned me off Yahoo was this huge mess of a "portal" homepage it turned into. Going to www.yahoo.com today, it's still the same. I have no idea what they're trying to be, and I doubt they do any of it very well.

Yahoo has been a poor search engine for the longest time. The reason no one noticed ( or knew better) is because their search engine algorithms were fundamentally similar to others such as Lycos, Altavista, and so fourth. You'd search for something and instead of getting proper and popular results, you got every single site that related to your search with no rank of importance. When you got the results, you'd end up having to crawl the search pages for what you wanted. Google on the other hand filters and ranks the results. You usually get what you want within the first page.

It didn't help, as Boney mentioned, that search engines were loaded up with portals, images, and crap. Googles simplicity is key. If people want news, they know where to get news. If people want JUST the search engine, Google is where its at.

The biggest thing Google introduced was its AdWords advertising system for profit generation. Older search engines had to use standard-y banner ads and have huge content systems to make these ads work.

With AdWords, Google doesn't have to contribute any content to the internet itself, it just puts a little box around some search results. Extremely unobtrusive. Not only that, but the targeted nature of these ads makes them *much* more effective and thus expensive than other ad systems.

_________________"When you post fewer lines of text than your signature, consider not posting at all." - A Wise Man

The difference, for me, was when I received my beta invite for Gmail. Once I made the switch from Yahoo! Mail, my fate was sealed. As of right now, I have only used 13% of available space and I've never deleted an email. While I had one gigabyte of space for my Gmail account, Yahoo! increased their size to a paltry 100 megabytes (or 1/10th the size). After 6 years of using Gmail as a primary email, I've only reached 990 megabytes of email, which is still just under the original space of my inbox. Oh, and my inbox size has been increasing since I opened the account, to 7,567 megabytes currently.

Also, the ease and scalability of Google Apps for small businesses/organizations is awe-inspiring and overlooked. A complete intranet with custom domain emails for free? That still blows me away.

EDIT: I just read that Yahoo! Mail inboxes have unlimited space. That's cool, but it's too late now for me to switch.

Yahoo was not originally a search engine, it was an index. People submitted their site, someone reviewed the submission, and then it got listed in some category. And of course the submitter could pay for expedited review. Once the web became too big for that to work well, Yahoo's fate was sealed.

_________________"You know, I have a great, wonderful, really original method of teaching antitrust law, and it kept 80 percent of the students awake. They learned things. It was fabulous." -- Justice Stephen Breyer

I don't think I've ever gotten a real "answer" from reading Yahoo Answers, but it's great for laughs. If any sort of IQ test was required of anyone who posts an answer there, that site would serve no purpose.

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